In order to harvest sugarcane from a field, a sugarcane harvester may move along a sugarcane field in order to gather sugarcane plants for further processing. The sugarcane plants may be severed from the ground by a base cutter assembly, then transported by feed rollers to a set of chopping drums, in order to be chopped into billets. The chopped plant matter may pass from the chopping drums into a trash extractor, which may clean the billet stream of leaves, dirt, or other trash. An output stream of billets may then pass from the extractor to a conveyer, which may lift the billets into a trailing wagon.
Various existing sugarcane harvesters may utilize axial-flow fans to generate air flow through the extractor, in order to clean leaves, dirt and other trash from streams of sugarcane billets. Traditional extractor designs, however, may be relatively inefficient and expensive, and may result in significant losses of sugarcane billets as well as relatively poor trash extraction.